Jeweling attempts

Energy weapon effects

Once again I felt like trying something new to me, this time I was going to attempt a jeweling effect on the lasers and PPCs. This wasn't too far from Shilone's engine glow, I'd just use different paints and paint onto varied sizes of targets (all tiny compared to the engine nozzle) and finally, they'd all also get gloss coated.

My colour scale

Based on my quick searches, some people who were much more excited than I was, went so far as to paint different types of beam weapons differently from each other. Meaning, normal lasers, ER lasers, pulse lasers and who knows what sort of x-pulse and microvariants each had a different style in the same weight class.

In my opinion it was more than enough if the small, medium, and large lasers and PPCs were somewhat different from each other. I just didn't see any added value of having to look at the colour to decide if the weapon was a Medium Laser, ER Medium Laser or a Medium Pulse laser (or some more modern variant).

• Small Lases: red (VGA 72710 Bloody Red)
  
• Medium Laser: green (VGA 72732 Escorpena Green)
  
• Large Laser: blue (VGA 72721 Magic Blue)
  
• PPC: light blue (VGC 72023 Electric Blue)

All of these got painted following the same pattern: the concave barrel end got painted with the base colour. Then I mixed a bit of creamy white and that got painted onto the lower right corner (a Camospecs video used the clock face example of sector 16:00-19:00). Finally I mixed a tiny bit of the base colour to the white and painted a single bright spot into the lower right corner (@~17:00). In some cases I managed it better than in some others, and some of the colours looked better than the others.

ER Small Laser

Only the Gargoyle had a small laser, in its Center Torso. The barrel's surface area was so sillily small that my attempt at a gradient didn't really show well, the photo here showed three layers.

While I was painting with the red that was a bit lighter than the RLM23 I went through all of the canopies on all the 'Mechs to paint a small edge into the top left corner of each panel. Doing this memory-based meant that I remembered the method wrong and the "brighter corner" effect should've been in the bottom right.

ER PPC

The PPC barrels of the Hellbringer and Summoner were larger than the lonely ER Small Laser so the progress of the paintjob showed a bit better:

 

One thing that I did differently from the tutorial video was that I didn't wait for the layers to dry but I painted on straight away, thinking I was doing some blending. That may have been an erroneous choice, but I could always do better with the next miniature(s).

Medium Pulse Laser, ER Medium Laser

Now I had a handful of medium-sized flashers. Dire Wolf had two in each hand, Mad Dog one per arm and Hellbringer had a cluster of three in its Left Torso. I only could choose something for the death rays of the Dire Wolf, and after a tiny bit of pondering I ended up in a mirror-symmetric setup because I didn't want the lasers to be in pairs or haphazardly mounted.

This green effect seemed to stand out nicer than the electric blue I had painted mere minutes earlier.

Large Pulse Laser, ER Large Laser

There were just two 'Mechs armed with the biggest flashlights, and being the last type I didn't even need to think were they lived.

Interestingly this, too, worked better than the electric blue of the PPCs, or maybe I had become this much better in this time.

Group photo n+1

Canopies and sensor lenses

While I was at it, and as I still had some little time left, I thought I could do a silly effect test on the canopies. As the energy weapon lenses with their tiny bright reflection dots seemed to work nicely, I wanted to see how they worked on the red panels. I tried it onto a couple at this point, and if it worked nicely I could do more easily, and if it didn't work, cleaning up would be simple.

It felt like it fit in the overall look of the Dire Wolf.

Summoner would've maybe needed a slightly stronger reflection point. I'd try that later.

Doing this effect on the tiny panes of the Gargoyle was a bit complicated even with a brand new paintbrush. What I got done felt good, especially from an angle that wasn't the one in this photo.

I also painted the couple of nose-mounted sensor suite lenses of the Mad Dog, I painted them red because it felt like a good generic lens, and fit in the theme of the canopies. The canopy reflection points didn't work here at all, they too went to the "//fixme" queue.

Hellbringer's canopy thrived here. Maybe the spot should've been made a bit more to the left, but this worked just nicely from more normal angles of viewing.

 

All of this was surprisingly fun to do, and I spent quite a lot less time than what I had expected to. The painting took half an hour only, as I didn't stop to wait for the layers to dry. Had I done that, I'd just conveyor belted it so that I'd done each of the base layers first, then the second ones in the same order and so on.

Buffy

Attempting modulation

 

Making the Jagdpanzer's top surfaces a bit more sun-bleached with buff (ABT035) had worked pretty decently, so I felt like trying it on these people as well. This first test photo showed the difference between a treated Dire Wolf and an untreated Summoner. I liked the effect so I used it on all of them.

My method was super simple. I poked several tiny dots of paint onto the upper parts with a toothpick and a couple of them onto the arms, and depending on the miniature and its pose something even onto the knees. Then I spun the paint around and mostly into nothing with my round-tipped blending brush and that was that. Had I waited for the next day for taking my photos, the paint would've been dry and the photo more accurate.

Mid-process photos

Kokoelma

Olivat ne aika yhdenmukaisia vaikka tässäkin oli kolmea eri vihreän pääsävyä ja ainakin kolmea erilaista naamiokuvioideaa. Jadekorostukset olisivat kyllä voineet olla voimakkaammatkin.

Oily washes

Sepia

 

The first hour

One evening I started by thinning a bit of Sepia (ABT002) into a wash. My Dire Wolf had been in the front of the queue from the beginning so it got the first treatment here as well. How to start with something new? By dropping a poolful of dark wash onto the largest cockpit canopy chunk, how else? I had thought in my twisted mind if I could get some funky cockpit jeweling effects done with oils, but this wasn't going to be the paint nor the method for it.

I went methodically through all the panels and edges from top to bottom. This time I knew to stress little about overflow, but I still didn't just slather the thing with my wash.

With the Dire Wolf highlighted without incidents I decided I could start with the Mad Dog. The method was the same, I simply highlighted the bits that the camouflage paints had toned down.

Somehow I still had some time to spare afterwards, so I started cleaning up the Dire Wolf's panels and other bits. Yes, I know I had been praising how ridiculously easy and simple it was to undo oil painting, but oh my how great it was!

Here I took a photo of two pin-washed and cleaned up Points with the three Points still waiting for their turn. This made them look much nicer, let's see what the gently buff layear I had thought of would do to them later on. Of course all of them would first need to wait for a day or two first, so I could avoid excess messiness.

Funny how different the greens of the Dire Wolf and Mad Dog were. The Mad Dog had a much better shade of green, I wished I had written that one down.

The second and third hours

The next time I got to paint I followed the exact same process with the remaining Points, starting from the canopies and then from the highest point down to the toes. All the panel lines, edges, holes, gaps and anything that might have benefited from a bit of an artificial shadow, every single one got pin washed.

Of course this took a silly amount of time, so just when I got done with the pin washing, I only got to start cleaning up Gargoyle's jade mohawk when I had to wrap up for the day. Then I had a three-day hobbytime break due to life in general. I was super happy again that the paintbrush barely moistened with thinner just did the trick and I could keep cleaning up my overflowed pin washes.

Looking at these photos I noticed that I should clean Dire Wolf's viewports quite a bit more still, under a better light. I had just chosen a badly lit spot the last time, so the end result wasn't quite what I wanted. Like I said in the previous post, I had had some megalomaniacal thoughts of doing jeweling with oils but at least with these colours and in this scale it wasn't going to happen.

Looking at it I thought that I could paint the tubelike thing from the top of Summoner's LRM launcher (between the tube and the head) with a dark grey. Not necessarily with the GG so that it wouldn't get visaually mixed with cannons and stuff, but somehow, to make it stand out a little more.

Gargoyle looked uglier and uglier. Maybe these panel highlights enhanced its roughness.

Mad Dog felt like it benefit greatly from the highlights. I should clean up its canopies as well before declaring the end being nigh, but these were tiny things now. At some point I realized that this version of Mad Dog didn't have the missile tips poking out of the LRM launcher unlike in the more emaciated IWM miniature. If I was entirely mad, I might consider trying to paint red tips into these launch tubes, but I wasn't quite sure if I was there quite yet.

Another gainer was Hellbringer's torso with the CASE panels and other details popping out so much better. This version of its missile launcher also hid the missile tips so I couldn't paint them either, and I really didn't see myself painting them red with white caps - inside their tubes.

Yeah, you could definitely see more details from these now, and the overall paintjob didn't feel like it got severely toned down.

Numbers, insignia and muddy bases

Being slightly differently detailed than the IWM minis the new CGL had less easy and simple places for the numbers and insignia on them, at least for someone with my nonexistent freehanding skills. I still was going to follow the same process as before, choosing a number for each and tried to find space for said numbers. First I painted the numbers with black, then over and offset slightly top/left them with white.

 

Both the Galaxy and Cluster insignia were based on light-coloured planets so for those I just painted cream-white circles. To get the Gamma Galaxy I painted a birdlike shape with jade, for the Cluster I painted a swordlike thing punching through the planet.

 

The Clan Jade Falcon insignia was the most complicated and challenging. I started with a grey box, added a birdlike jade shape, a black line at the talons and later yellow points for talons to grab onto the black sword handle and a yellow beak around where the head should be.

In a way it was pretty simple, but as said, in this scale and with my limited skills it wasn't child's play. Of course I could've ignored them all but I wanted to get these markings onto my minis.

Muddiness

There had been no plans for the hex bases, but as I was here I decided to mess them up right now, with the main painting business being behind me. I got my Vallejo mud products and thinned them down with water to get them spread on the bases to begin with. Most of the stuff was light-coloured European Mud but when I added a bit of almost black Russian Mud all of it ended up pretty damn dark.

I applied to goo pseudorandomly onto the bases, I wanted the terrain to be uneven. I also tried to pile the mud so that it looked like my OmniMechs had just stopped somewhere and displaced the crap from below their feet. Not that it showed well from this photo, or with the paste being wet and not set yet.

So far I hadn't painted on the weathering pastes, but now we'd get to do that too, later. My next step was going to be in the footsteps of Bob Ross but without the happy trees or mountains.